Going to Fitness Classes But Not Seeing Results? Here's why and How to Fix It

Author James Swift | Category Training | Reading Time 6 minutes

It’s the most common and frustrating paradox in the modern commercial gym. Week in and week out, members file into studios, dutifully find their spot, follow the instructor’s cues, and sweat, grunt, and groan for 60 minutes. They are consistent. They are dedicated. They are, by any visible metric, working hard. And yet, months or even years later, they confess the same disheartening truth over the hum of the treadmills "I go to five classes a week, but I don't look any different" or the familiar, confused refrain, "That class never, ever gets easier."

They have been taught by decades of marketing to equate "working out" with training, and they are not, and have never been, the same thing. One is a distracting, temporary experience; the other is a cumulative, long-term process.

This admission is not a badge of honour. It is a confession of futility. It lays bare the critical, foundational flaw in their approach, a flaw that guarantees stagnation. This lack of results is not a failure of their individual effort; it is the predictable and unavoidable outcome of a failed model. They have been taught by decades of marketing to equate "working out" with training, and they are not, and have never been, the same thing. One is a distracting, temporary experience; the other is a cumulative, long-term process.

It is an absolute certainty that any training methodology not built on the logical, measurable, and mandatory principle of progressive overload will fail to produce long-term, significant results in strength or hypertrophy. I call this phenomenon The Activity Trap. It is the pervasive and comfortable delusion that as long as you are moving, sweating, and getting sore, you must be improving. This lie is the very cornerstone of the group fitness industry, and it is the single biggest reason most of the exercising public remains stuck in a state of permanent, unchanging novice.

Entropy: The Systemic Flaw

The entire business model of group fitness is in direct, irreconcilable conflict with the biological law of adaptation. Order your measurable progress; it decreases unless focused energy is added to the system. In training, this "energy" is a specific, calculated, and incrementally increasing stimulus. The group class, by its very design, is a system of chaos, not order.

A class’s primary goals are engagement, entertainment, and, above all, retention. The workout must be a fun, shared experience. It must cater simultaneously to the 22-year-old first-timer who has never touched a weight and the 45-year-old veteran who has been in that same class for five years. To keep both engaged, the workout must be novel. It must be random. The music must change, the "moves" must be new. The instructor's primary function is that of a DJ and a master of ceremonies.

This structure, this celebration of randomisation, is a programme specifically designed to prevent adaptation. It ensures the workout always feels hard, precisely because you are never allowed to master anything. You are just re-testing your baseline fitness, over and over, forever stuck in the initial, neurologically demanding learning phase of a new movement pattern.

This is the exact opposite of training. Training is a deliberate, often boring, and repetitive process of imposing a specific stress, allowing the body to recover, and then returning to impose a slightly greater stress. This is what forces adaptation. A class that "never gets easier" is not a sign that it's a great workout. It is the ultimate, undeniable proof that it isn't working.

The Psychology of the Trap: Misinterpreting the Signals

The problem is one of a deeply flawed perception. You feel like you worked hard. You feel sore. Your instructor told you that you "crushed it." But feelings are not data. This is where the nuance lies. You are not stupid; you are misinterpreting the evidence your body is giving you.

1. The Seduction of Fatigue: You have been conditioned to equate exhaustion with a productive stimulus. A HIIT class that leaves you in a puddle of sweat feels more effective than a structured set of 5 heavy squats followed by 4 minutes of rest. The squats, however, are sending a clear, potent signal to build strength and muscle. The HIIT class is just sending a chaotic signal to get better at handling metabolic distress.

2. The Cult of Soreness (DOMS): This is perhaps the most insidious deception. Novices are taught to chase delayed-onset muscle soreness, believing it is the primary indicator of muscle damage and, therefore, growth. This is false. Soreness is simply a marker of a novel stimulus, not necessarily a productive one. You can get cripplingly sore from running downhill for 30 minutes, but it will not build your biceps. Your body adapts to the stimulus, and soreness fades. A good programme will only make you truly sore at the very beginning, or when a new variable is introduced. Chasing soreness just means you are constantly introducing random, novel movements, which is the very definition of The Activity Trap.

3. The Abdication of Thought: A real programme requires thinking. It requires a logbook. It requires you to remember what you did last Tuesday and to calculate what you must do today. It demands focus. A class, in contrast, is the ultimate mental comfort. You just show up. You are told what to do, when to do it, and for how long. You abdicate all responsibility for your own progression to the instructor, who, as we will see, is not equipped to manage it. This comfort is powerfully seductive, but it is the enemy of progress.

The Role of the Instructor vs. The Coach

Just as the reference article distinguishes the solitary lifter from the coached one, we must distinguish the instructor from the coach. They are not the same job.

An instructor's role is to manage the experience of a group. They are a motivator, a safety monitor, and a performer. Their goal is to deliver a fun, energetic, and safe session to 20 people at once.

A coach's role is to manage the process of an individual. Their goal is to analyse movement, identify the single most important flaw, provide the correct cue to fix it, and, most importantly, manage the variables of a long-term programme to ensure progressive overload.

Your instructor is not a bad coach; they are simply not coaching you. They cannot, in a class of 20, remember that you squatted 10kg for 12 reps last week and therefore need to be using the 12.5kg dumbbells today. This is personal training, which comes at a much higher price point than a less than cup of coffee, which is what is paid for a class as part of your membership.

The Modalities: A Deeper Analysis

Since our concern is measurable physical change—more muscle, more strength—we must dissect the most popular modalities that promise these results.

HIIT, Bootcamp, and "Functional" Circuits are the kings of The Activity Trap. Their entire philosophy is metabolic chaos. The body's adaptation to this is not to build larger, stronger muscle fibres. The adaptation is to become more metabolically efficient. It gets better at buffering lactate, replenishing glycogen, and managing heat. This adaptation has a remarkably low ceiling. You become efficient at that specific level of chaos, and then the adaptation stops cold. Your cardiovascular output, after an initial novice bump, will stagnate completely because the stimulus is never logically and progressively increased. You are just getting better at surviving the same 30-second burpee interval.

Spin and Indoor Cycling are, simply, cardiovascular endurance training. Let us be even more precise: they are initially good at improving VO2 max and heart health, but this adaptation is short-lived. This is the most subtle part of The Activity Trap. A spin class looks structured—it has programmed climbs, sprints, and recovery intervals. But it lacks the one thing necessary for long-term cardiovascular adaptation: measurable, progressive overload. The instructor's cue to "turn up the resistance" is a subjective, emotional prompt, not a quantitative metric. You are not tracking your average wattage or total kilojoules from last Tuesday's session and attempting to beat it by 2%. You are not aiming to hold a 20-minute time trial at a higher average heart rate. You are simply re-living the same experience, and your cardiovascular system, having fully adapted to that baseline level of work, has no further incentive to improve.

BodyPump, Pilates, and "Toning" Classes operate on the opposite end of the spectrum: high-rep, low-weight endurance. This is the kingdom of the "burn." You have been taught, for decades, to chase this metabolic sensation, believing it is the feeling of fat melting or muscle growing. It is neither. It is simply the accumulation of metabolic byproducts in the muscle. You are training a very specific, low-yield adaptation: local muscular endurance.

You are getting better at enduring the burn. This is why you can use the same 10kg barbell for an entire year and never, ever look any different. This work almost exclusively trains Type I muscle fibres (slow-twitch/endurance). These fibres have almost zero potential for hypertrophy (growth). The Type II fibres—the ones that actually get bigger, stronger, and give you the "toned" shape you want—are not even being recruited. To recruit them, you must lift heavy.

Attention!!!

Remember this critical axiom regarding progress: as you attempt to transition from chaotic exercising to structured training, the tendency will be to revert to the familiar, fatiguing workout every time the structured progression feels "boring" or "not hard enough." This is true even if you know, consciously, that the programme is what you need to do.

A proper training session might not even make you sweat that much. A heavy set of 3 on the deadlift, followed by 5 minutes of rest, does not feel like a HIIT class, but it is infinitely more productive for building strength. You must have the discipline to follow the numbers in the logbook, not the feeling in your lungs. This is the best reason not to let these habits get entrenched, they are damned hard to fix once you're addicted to the fatigue.

The one thing common to all these plateaus is the covert nature of their failure: you will be well along the way to stagnant mediocrity before you realise you've wasted months, or even years, of effort. The initial 6 weeks did give you results, this is the "novice effect," where any new stimulus works. But you are now stuck in Year 2, repeating those first 6 weeks, forever. You must check your logbook. You must have a programme. You must prioritise progress, not just activity. If you don't have a program or know where to start, you know where I am James Swift